My mom received an email about "Health Care Info," from a large community listserve, sent by a person who received the email "routed from a credible former colleague," originally written by... Who knows; maybe Sarah Palin? Here is my response:
The first sentence is not only written to scare (with no explanation whatsoever), but it is a complete outright lie: "...is over 1,000 pages long and puts the government in charge of our health care system." The mention of 1,000 pages is a pointless scare tactic (as someone said, the last Harry Potter book was >700 pages long), and nothing proposed by anyone even comes close to "government in charge of our health care system."
For the past 30 years, it is the insurance companies who are already dictating how doctors practice, and what care patients can or cannot get. This has happened while every year there are over a million more Americans without health insurance (this year now there are 48 million uninsured), many of these uninsured people either get very sick or end in the hospital--which all Americans have paid for via high & rising premiums, and bankrupt public hospitals--while insurance companies have shown record profits year after year & their CEOs earn increasing salaries in the millions.
If you or anyone you know have ever dealt on the phone with an insurance company trying to deny you care, I strongly urge you to read this New York Times article on Wednesday explaining why. This former executive in the health insurance industry, who's job was to devise ways to scare Americans from important health reform (just like the email below), reached his conscience and now is speaking out strongly in support of needed health reform.
Insurance companies are also afraid of & against progressive ideas like the Health Info "Exchange" (mentioned in the email below) which will promote free-market competition and make it much easier for you to individually compare & contrast different health plans (currently, sorely lacking), and therefore improve health coverage + bring down premiums by competition.The types of rules that health care reform plans indeed want to enact that do affect health care are things like requiring all health insurance plans to cover annual checkups, cancer screenings--saving lives & saving costs by preventing end-stage hospitalizations--and to outlaw insurance companies from denying care based on "pre-existing conditions." These are all changes in the current Health Insurance Reform that everyone (except insurance company CEOs & others people trying to scare Americans) agrees are good and necessary.
Therefore, I would indeed agree with going online "AND WRITE YOUR REPS"--as the email below urges you--but I would advocate for contacting them in support of real substantial health reform aspects like these (instead of the vague scare tactics announced elsewhere).[The original email forwarded, forwarded, forwarded, from some unidentified "guru," into my mom's inbox is right here below:]
-Abe
Beyond all reason of a doubt we need to stand up for healthcare reform with a public option. Thanks so much for your post, Abe! Here's a link to one of my recent blogposts on healthcare, equipped with many links to other good reasons why we need real healthcare reform: http://food4thoughtandaction.blogspot.com/2009/08/no-more-of-this-sick-care-system-we.html But as Michael Pollan so eloquently stated and Jessica noted in a recent email to the Primary Healthcare listserve, "The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care." We must not forget about reforming our FOOD SYSTEM. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10pollan.html?_r=1
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